ABROAD; A Berliner's Portraits of People and Her Familiar, and Foreign, Home

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

Published: January 8, 2009

BERLIN -- Not all culture is global yet. Outside aging lefty circles in Greenwich Village or the Berkshires, the photographer Gis? Freund mostly causes head-scratching in the United States. Among other reasons, she published unflattering pictures of Eva Per?n Life magazine in 1950, troubling the Argentine dictator and ruffling diplomatic relations, so the State Department officially declared her an ''unwanted person.''

America's loss.

She wasn't Robert Capa or even Margaret Bourke-White. She wasn't a great photojournalist, but she was a gifted pioneer. Starting in 1935, when Andr?alraux enlisted her to document the First International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture, she left behind memorable portraits of Louis Aragon and Vita Sackville-West, Boris Pasternak and Stefan Zweig, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce (the last two in color, when color film was still new).

More than half a century later, some of these portraits can look a little dated, but there's Joyce relaxing with his grandson in a park, cane slung across chest like a military sash; and Malraux, wind-swept in collar-up overcoat with runty cigarette between lips. (A French postage stamp was based on it, without, for politically correct reasons, the cigarette.) Freund actually read what her subjects wrote, she moved in their circles, and her best photographs convey both an intimacy and an insider's romance with a bygone world between the wars.

Her hometown is celebrating her now. She was born in Berlin in 1908, fled Germany in 1933, then had some shows and books published here during her later years that returned her to local attention. (She died in 2000.) Her portraits currently occupy the exhibition hall at the Willy Brandt Haus. The Ephraim-Palais has some of the lesser-known pictures she shot when she returned briefly to visit postwar Berlin in 1957 and 1962, as a kind of prodigal daughter, estranged but open-eyed. These are more interesting, in a way.

Freund was hoping to find lost landmarks of her childhood. Instead, she discovered a place largely unfamiliar, and her photographs steer blessedly clear of melancholy and moralizing; they're cool, matter of fact, not art but honest and true.

True to an exile's experience. She and the writer Walter Benjamin became friends in Paris. Writing about his own Berlin childhood, Benjamin once recalled how living abroad had made it ''clear to me that I would soon have to bid a long, perhaps lasting farewell to the city of my birth.'' He added, ''Several times in my inner life I had already experienced the process of inoculation as something salutary.'' That's roughly what Freund's photographs suggest too: her attempt to inoculate herself against the vicissitudes of time through the lens of a camera.

She wrote a letter on her return to Berlin, in slightly broken English peppered with German and French: ''I came to the result that not only the Berliners have paid for whole Germany but also that only the innocent have suffered, because all those of my friends (otherwise they wouldn't have been my friends) who had fought Nazism, had been in KZs'' (concentration camps). She added: ''The few survivants of our generation, they are now the most 'anr?ge' '' (disreputable) ''crowd for the fact that they hadn't been Nazis and are therefore '?rt?'' (isolated) ''by the Americans as not reliable.'' It was the same, she noted, in the Communist zone.

It took an outcast to know one. Her father, a wealthy Jewish textile manufacturer and art collector, gave Freund a Voigtlander 6 x 9 camera when she was 17 and a Leica in 1929, the year she graduated from a secondary school for working-class girls. She had decided to quit her upper-middle-class surroundings to attend the Waldschule Eichkamp, and she lived there with her teacher. After that, at Freiburg, then Frankfurt, during its heyday with Theodor Adorno, Karl Mannheim and Norbert Elias, she studied sociology and art history, protested against the Nazis, photographed the protests (her close-up pictures, attempting to go beyond just documents, convey urgency, above all); and, with the Nazis nearly at her door, she left for Paris, Leica in hand.

In Frankfurt she had researched the roots of photography, a subject not yet widely taken seriously but very dear to Benjamin. The two of them would retreat from the Biblioth?e Nationale in Paris to play chess and drink coffee. In her portraits he's always the bookish Jew, with soup-straining mustache, poring over a manuscript through wire-rim spectacles. Benjamin quotes Freund in his ''Arcades Project.'' ''We can only imagine what it must have meant to that epoch suddenly to see before it, in so lifelike a form, the celebrated figures of the stage, of the podium -- in short, of public life,'' Freund wrote, and Benjamin repeated, about the earliest photographs.

That's how she described the effect of her own portraits as well. Red-faced, in red jacket and slicked hair, Joyce suddenly emerges from the thickets of his prose; Pasternak, at the writers' congress, is no longer the disillusioned Communist (''the weeping Bolshevik'' was Nabokov's phrase) but a handsome, beaming poet. Later, during the '60s, Freund would make portraits of Le Corbusier looking unusually quizzical and Robert Lowell terse in a Paris cafe. She did her best work before the war but occasionally, as in these cases, produced a striking portrait after it.

But the postwar Berlin photographs, mostly from 1957, are a thing apart. They show Berlin before the wall went up. That city was as different to her as Berlin is now to those who remember the wall. She was measuring the distance between the old city of her childhood and the one she found in the mid-'50s, as we do today between the war-battered city before the wall and the sprawling, confusing capital that Berlin has become.

Her photographs document the construction sites, the bombed squares and the old tenements with clothes hanging from clotheslines, the classic Berlin scene made popular at the turn of the century by Heinrich Zille. She took a picture of a Jewish kindergarten and of a young woman in Capri pants eating ice cream outside a dress shop that could have been in Paris or New York. She was struck by a store with a sign in the window for American chickens (heads and feet removed, it said) and by fashionable young mothers pushing strollers in West Berlin. A group of young men in turtlenecks and V-neck sweaters caused her to note that the new German generation seemed both antimilitary and lost.

Then there's her photograph of the new Hansaviertel in the west, a postwar housing development that represented modern, capitalist Berlin. The picture has no clear vanishing point. It's almost incoherent at a glance. Its openness was a metaphor. Benjamin had written about how he hoped, through inoculation, that ''the feeling of longing would no more gain mastery over my spirit than a vaccine does over a healthy body.'' He added, ''I sought to limit its effect through insight into the irretrievability of the past.''

Bygone Berlin was irretrievable. Its future was a stranger to the past. That's still largely the case. That was what the Hansaviertel represented. Freund's photographs spoke to this city and to Europe at midcentury, and to her own condition.

They're not really a thing apart. They're her self-portrait.

PHOTOS: A 1957 work by Gisčle Freund, part of an exhibition of her postwar photography in Berlin.(PHOTOGRAPH BY STADTMUSEUM BERLIN)(pg. C8); A 1957 Gisčle Freund photograph of the Hansaviertel, a postwar housing development in West Berlin. Two exhibitions of her work are now under way in Berlin, the city of her birth.(PHOTOGRAPH BY STADTMUSEUM BERLIN); A 1957 photograph of kindergartners in Berlin, one of Freund's works taken during a return visit to the city.(PHOTOGRAPH BY STADTMUSEUM BERLIN); Artist portraits from Freund's days in Paris: left, Simone de Beauvoir in 1952; above, Henri Matisse in 1948.(PHOTOGRAPH BY WILLY BRANDT HAUS); (PHOTOGRAPH BY STADTMUSEUM BERLIN); Left, a 1958 photograph of a convention hall in Berlin; above, a 1950 self-portrait.(PHOTOGRAPHS BY STADTMUSEUM BERLIN; WILLY BRANDT HAUS)(pg. C8)